onzales (form erly Tinguaro), Lim
onar, M
ily Fry.
Published for Neon Queen Collective by Wendi Norris Gallery, 8
Octavia St. San Francisco, California 94102
A two-part exhibition curated by N E O N Q U E E N C O L L E C T I
V E
María Magdalena Campos-Pons
Notes on Sugar and Like the lonely traveler
Lise Ragbir and Amy Hauft
I N T R O D U C T I O N : 02
María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Some Considerations
Eddie Chambers
Like the lonely traveler: Video Works by María Magdalena
Campos-Pons
Phillip Townsend
I N T E R V I E W : 09
“Visual Healer”: An Interview with María Magdalena
Campos-Pons
Neon Queen Collective (Jessi DiTillio, Kaila Schedeen, and
Phillip Townsend)
WO R K S I N E X H I B I T I O N S : 12
AC K N OW L E D G M E N TS : 20
I S B N 9 7 8 - 0 - 69 2 - 1 7 5 3 6 - 1
Catalogue Edited by Neon Queen Collective (Jessi DiTillio, Kaila
Schedeen,
and Phillip Townsend). Catalogue Design by Becky Nasadowski.
Published by Wendi Norris Gallery, 8 Octavia St., San Francisco, CA
94102.
01
Christian-Green Gallery | January 25–May 5, 2018
The career of artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons has spanned
several decades and as many continents. Truly exemplifying the
diversity of the global Black experience, Campos-Pons has
investigated her Afro-Asian-Cuban heritage through a prolific body
of work in an array of media. With Notes on Sugar, the Neon Queen
Collective focuses on the history of the African Diaspora and
critical race theory through the lens of this influential and
innovative artist’s work.
The Christian-Green Gallery is a central feature of Black Studies’
Art and Archive Initiative, which collects and displays art,
archival materials, and special collections relating to the Black
experience. The gallery provides a space for intellectual inquiry
and collaboration between art historians, artists, curators,
scholars, and viewers. Jessi DiTillio, Kaila Schedeen, and Phillip
Townsend of the Neon Queen Collective have realized an
extraordinary project involving the work of one important artist
across two separate exhibitions. Collaborating with faculty and
staff, these students mobilized the resources of the gallery, the
Warfield Center, and the university at large to bring their vision
to life. The fruit of these efforts, Notes on Sugar and Like the
Lonely Traveler, will inspire audiences to reflect on how art
engages with migration, the history of the Caribbean, and the power
of creative transformation.
Lise Ragbir Director of The Art Galleries at Black Studies at The
University of Texas at Austin and Interim Director of the John L.
Warfield Center for African and African American Studies
Preface
Like the lonely traveler: Video Works by María Magdalena
Campos-Pons
Visual Arts Center | September 21–December 8, 2018
The Visual Arts Center in the Department of Art and Art History is
proud to present the first ever retrospective of video work by
María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Born in Cuba to parents with African,
Asian, and Hispanic heritage, Campos-Pons later relocated to the
US; she uses her art to explore the palimpsest of history imprinted
upon her. This presentation of a selection of videos in differing
formats and styles spans the thirty years of her career. These
works have been previously exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the
Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Dak'Art Biennale in Senegal,
and other venues.
As noted in my colleague’s preface, the curatorial force behind
this exhibition is the Neon Queen Collective. Jessi DiTillio,
the
Visual Arts Center’s Curatorial Fellow 2017/18, determined she
would work collaboratively with her fellow doctoral students Kaila
Schedeen and Phillip Townsend. As an interdisciplinary space
within the Department of Art and Art History, the Visual Arts
Center provides a platform for projects that demonstrate the
creativity and academic rigor of our students. We are pleased to
host this project and are honored to welcome María Magdalena
Campos-Pons and her transdisciplinary inquiries to our
campus.
Amy Hauft Acting Director of the Visual Arts Center and Leslie
Waggoner Professor in Sculpture in the Department of Art and Art
History at The University of Texas at Austin
Truly exemplifying the diversity of the global Black experience,
Campos-Pons has investigated her Afro-Asian-Cuban heritage through
a prolific
body of work in an array of media.
02
Notes on Sugar / Like the lonely traveler María Magdalena
Campos-Pons
Introduction María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Some Considerations by
Eddie Chambers Professor, Department of Art and Art History
University of Texas at Austin
The exhibition Notes on Sugar presents an exceedingly rare
opportunity for us to see a body of work by María Magdalena
Campos-Pons, a Cuban-born artist whose practice represents a
dynamic and compelling aspect of contemporary art with pronounced
links to the history of Cuba, the largest island in the Caribbean.
Though a major curatorial undertaking that took place in New York
about five years ago declared the Caribbean to be “at the
Crossroads of the World,” it is, sadly, very much the case that
beyond those who live there or who have familial connec- tions to
the region, the Caribbean is a zone that scarcely registers on the
wider international, cultural, or political stage (figs. 1 &
2).1 What looks like willful disengagement or indifference is all
the more perplexing if we acknowledge that so much of what we know
as modernity, several centuries in the making, was fashioned in the
so-called New World (with the Caribbean at its epicenter).
It was of course the Atlantic Slave Trade, taking place between the
sixteenth and late nineteenth centuries, that saw the forging and
honing of globalization, of the commodification of people as units
of labor, of the embedding of capitalism in pretty much all aspects
of the ways in which we live. This regarding of the Caribbean as a
laboratory for globalization—that is, the seemingly unstoppable
international flows of capital, in pursuit of ever greater
dividends that benefit fewer and fewer people outside of the
financial elite— is seldom acknowledged by the world’s economists
and historians, beyond those with pronounced connections to the
region.
In engaging with this body of work by Campos-Pons, we are in many
respects obliged to consider another vexatious legacy of the making
of the New World; that is, racial hierarchies in which
the default position is to locate whiteness is positioned at the
top of a pyramid of humanity, with increased gradations of color,
ending with the world’s darkest people, at the base of the pyramid.
We might argue or speculate
about the extent to which Cuba’s post-1959 governance has sought to
challenge racial hierarchies, but it certainly remains the case
that across the Caribbean region, notwithstanding the
majority
We must instead regard sugar as a pseudonym for slavery
itself.
FIG. 1 (top) & FIG. 2 (bottom) Caribbean: Crossroads of the
World The Studio Museum in Harlem, June 14, 2012–October 21,
2012
Image courtesy of The Studio Museum in Harlem. photo: Adam
Reich.
03
Neon Queen Collective 2018
populations of African descent, white privilege continually
manifests itself within the spheres of the economic and the social.
We here in the US might perhaps need to disabuse ourselves of the
notion that these concerns are abstract. With tourism being a
leading earner of much sought-after US dollars and equivalent
currencies, for many nations in the Caribbean, we would do well to
recognize that it is perhaps within this industry that we see the
most explicit manifestation of the power and operating of
whiteness, in its interactions with, or proximity to, black
bodies.
Notes on Sugar ensures that we as visitors to the exhibition must
consider the multiple ways in which sugar figures in Caribbean/
Cuban histories. We are of course obliged to regard sugar not as
simply, or merely, a sweet crystalline substance obtained from
various plants, especially sugarcane and sugar beet, consisting
essentially of sucrose, and used as a sweetener in food and drink.
We must instead regard sugar as a pseudonym for slavery itself.
Along with cotton and tobacco, no single commodity so represented
slavery’s barbarism as much as sugar. In one of his many books on
the histories of the Atlantic Slave Trade and enslavement, James
Walvin noted:
Few slaves were spared the rigours of labour on sugar plantations.
The old and the young, the sick and the marginal, all were
marshalled into suitable jobs for their age and condition. On a
sugar property, the enslaved people endured the harshest of
conditions, especially in the crop time between the new year and
midsummer, when they were exposed to sun, heat, tropical
downpours—all good for sugar, but hard on the labour force. . . .
Sugar cultivation was the most gruelling of labours, a fact
reflected in the demography of sugar slavery. Human suffering was
at its worst on the sugar plantations: life expectancy, infant
mortality, low fertility and sickness formed part of the persistent
pattern indicating that sugar slaves fared worse than slaves in
other industries and occupations.2
Were it not for the ravages of diabetes amongst populations of the
African Diaspora, we might perhaps regard the infinitely
destructive capabilities of sugar as history’s revenge,
particularly given that sugar is not a food and interacts with the
human body with characteristics more akin to a narcotic than a form
of edible nourishment. Going back to at least the time of
Campos-Pons’s birth, Caribbean artists, and artists of African and
Caribbean backgrounds, have utilized the subject, or the
materiality, of sugar in their work. For example, in 1960, the
Guyanese painter Aubrey Williams executed a graphic and bloody
painting recalling the 1763 Berbice Slave Rebellion (fig. 3). The
painting,
titled Revolt, depicts an unshackled slave—Accara, one of the
rebellion’s leaders—cutlass in hand, wreaking terrible and dreadful
revenge on his tormentors. An important aspect of the painting is
the symbolism of the sugarcane stalks that stand in a corner of the
painting, near the scene of carnage. Thus, within the painting,
Williams references sugarcane production as emblematic of the
slaves’ wretched, miserable, and dehumanized condition. As
novelist, playwright, and poet Jan Carew observed, “The gold Guiana
yielded was to come mainly from sugar and slavery.”3
In more recent decades and years, other artists of African
heritage, from British practitioners such as Keith Piper and Donald
Rodney, to Beninese artist Meschac Gaba have, much like Campos-Pons
herself, been compelled to make provocative work that has at its
core investigations into sugar and its sordid and complex
histories. Gaba’s Sweetness (2006) was a large-scale model
(deliberately occupying a large proportion of the gallery floor on
which it was installed) of a fantasy futuristic city featuring many
instantly recognizable landmark structures from around the world,
all constructed, or sculpted, from sugar. According to Jérôme Sans,
“Meschac Gaba’s installation makes an utterly sensitive statement,
providing an alternative to the usual interpretations of our
global- ized world. This sugar mock-up of a utopian urban
development reveals a unified yet incredibly fragile society, pure
in its ideals but toxic in its realization.”4
FIG. 3 Aubrey Williams, Revolt, 1960
© Estate of Aubrey Williams. All rights reserved, ARS NY and
DACS/Artimage 2017. photo: Jonathan Orenstein
04
Notes on Sugar / Like the lonely traveler María Magdalena
Campos-Pons
It may possibly be an uncomfortable fact for the artist, but
Campos-Pons (now a longtime resident of the United States) is
exactly the same age as the Cuban revolution that swept away the
right-wing dictatorial government of Fulgencio Batista. Cuban
artists, within the country as well as beyond it, have given us an
aston- ishing variety of paintings, sculpture, performance, and
installation pieces that comment, or reflect, on particularly
uncomfortable and challenging aspects of Cuba’s histories. For
Campos- Pons, relocation to the US has encouraged, or enabled,
her
to make no end of cogent, fascinating work that reflects on the
histories of her native Cuba. She has produced a highly significant
body of work that unflinchingly, and with pronounced creative
resonances, comments on the consequences of enslavement and its
inextricable links to the cultivation of sugar. The most discerning
of visitors to this exhibition will be mindful not only of the
previously mentioned metaphor of sugar representing histories of
enslavement, but also the ways in which cultural investigations of
Afro-Cuban identities are located at the heart of Campos-Pons’s
singular artistic practice.
Keith Piper, for his part, referenced the symbiotic relationship
between enslavement and sugar in his mid-1980s work The Seven Rages
of Man (fig. 4). This grand, expansive work featured seven
busts—each a partial cast of the artist’s head, and each set
against a montage of compelling and graphic images and text. Piper
took the viewer through seven stages of his existence as an African
man, beginning with a recollection of life in the precolonial days
of Africa’s great ancient kingdoms. The narrative then progressed
to a section recalling the brutality and horror of the slave trade.
Piper’s second and third sections recalled the barbarity of the
Middle Passage, life on the plantation and the days of slavery. It
was one of these panels that not only put sugar in the dock as far
as slavery was concerned, but for good measure, brought with it
several additional, equally cogent, narratives.
The enslaved African in one of Piper’s panels is depicted manacled
by his neck, a few links of chain dangling earthwards. Stenciled
(or, more accurately perhaps, branded) onto the chest of Piper’s
second incarnation, as a captured African bound for hell, were the
words “property of tate & lyle," this being one of the largest
producers and marketers of sugar in Britain. It should also be
noted that the one of the most important museum collections in
Britain owes its exis- tence to one half of the original Tate &
Lyle sugar baron partnership.
1. Spread across three venues, the exhibition Caribbean: Crossroads
of the World (June 12, 2012–Jan. 6, 2013) was originated by El
Museo del Barrio, New York, and took place there, at the Queens
Museum of Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
2. James Walvin, The Trader, the Owner, the Slave: Parallel Lives
in the Age of Slavery (London: Vintage, 2007), 125.
3. Jan Carew, “Revolt,” Tropica (Dec. 1960): 4. This article, on
the Aubrey Williams' painting Revolt, references the 1763 slave
uprising in British Guiana.
4. Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (website), “Meschac Gaba:
Sweetness,”
http://ucca.org.cn/en/exhibition/meschac-gaba-sweetness. Accessed
Nov. 12, 2017.
FIG. 4 Keith Piper, Seven Rages of Man (detail), c. 1985, mixed
media
© Keith Piper. photo: Eddie Chambers.
05
Neon Queen Collective 2018
issues central to the experience of diasporic populations by
investigating history and memory, and their roles in the formation
of identity. Sugar/Bittersweet (figs. 5 & 11), the centerpiece
of Notes on Sugar, represents the artist’s clearest articulation of
the transatlantic slave trade. The work addresses the participation
of African royals, the impacts of Chinese migration to Cuba, and
the subsequent labor performed by both enslaved Africans and
Chinese indentured servants in the sugar fi elds. This mixed-media
installation combines sugar, glass, African spears and stools, and
Chinese stools to create a sculptural sugarcane fi eld.
Notes on Sugar: The Work of María Magdalena Campos-Pons by Phillip
Townsend
Among the several cash crops—tobacco, rice, cotton, and sugar—
cultivated and harvested by enslaved Africans from the sixteenth to
the late nineteenth centuries, during the operation of the
transatlantic slave trade, sugar is perhaps the most overlooked in
terms of its continuing impact today. As sugar became a household
staple—used as medicine, a spice, a condiment, decorative material,
a sweetener, and a preservative—in North America and Europe, it
became a major contributor to rapidly expanding global economies.
This in turn caused an increased demand for slave labor. Although
slaves were primarily captured through raids and kidnappings, a
signifi cant number were acquired through commercial trade
agreements forged between European merchants and Beninian and
Kongonian royals. A large number of these newly enslaved Africans
were shipped to the Caribbean, where vast acres of sugarcane
awaited their arrival.1 While sugar has played a major role in the
social and political history of the West, contemporary societies
rarely acknowledge this pervasive infl uence. The exhibition Notes
on Sugar aims to encourage dialogue and provoke critical thought on
the insidious impact of sugar on enslaved Africans and their
descendants through the creative vision of the Afro-Cuban artist
María Magdalena Campos-Pons.
Born in 1959, Campos-Pons bears a familial history that is
intermingled with the sugar industry and slavery’s legacies. Her
African ancestors were enslaved and brought from Nigeria to Cuba as
laborers in the sugar industry. Familial roots also tie her to Asia
and the indentured Chinese workers who also labored on sugar
plantations. Even while growing up immersed in the rich African
diasporic culture of the Cuban province of Matanzas, Campos-Pons
did not fully consider her contemporary environ- ment until after
her own political self-exile. Immigrating to the US in the early
1990s, Campos-Pons left her homeland believing that she would
likely be separated from her family for the rest of her life. This
trauma prompted her to use her artistic practice to meditate on the
original displacement of her African and Asian ancestors.
Since immigrating to the United States, Campos-Pons has garnered
praise as one of the most important artists to emerge from
post-revolutionary Cuba. Her oeuvre bears witness to
FIG. 5 María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Sugar/Bittersweet (detail),
2010, mixed media installation, dimensions variable
© María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Image courtesy of Smith College
Museum of Art. photo: Stephen Petegorsky. Loan courtesy of the
Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at
the Hutchins Center, Harvard University.
06
Notes on Sugar / Like the lonely traveler María Magdalena
Campos-Pons
Campos-Pons created the disks that are used throughout the
installation by melting and molding sugar by hand. This act
metaphorically embodies the work of enslaved workers handling the
sugarcane throughout the refinement process. During the sugarcane
harvest—la zafra—slaves with machetes cut the cane by hand in the
fields before it was loaded into oxcarts and hauled to the mill
(fig. 6). There, the cane was ground in a trapiche or grinding
mill; the resulting guarapo (syrup) was boiled, then cooled,
clarified, drained, and crystallized in molds of clay pots (fig.
7).2 The sugar and pâte de verre disks range in color from white to
dark brown, referencing the colors and grades of sugar, as well as
the skin colors of the Cuban population.3 Campos-Pons also
incorporated disks and balls of actual brown sugar—panela from
Colombia—in the form in which they are sold today. The labor that
Campos-Pons performed in creating the various components of the
conceptual sugarcane field serves as a metaphorical reclamation of
the power held by those figures who controlled and participated in
the sugar and slave trades.
Another work included in this exhibition, Are Those Tears or
Pearls, My Beloved One? (fig. 10), articulates Campos-Pons’s
complex relationship with the places she has lived. The etching
features a single female figure, with a bag hanging over her right
shoulder, standing upon a shore of pearls or tears while looking
across a large body of water. The figure’s gaze is fixed on strings
of tears or pearls falling from the sky into the sea. From her bag,
thin stems flow down onto the bolus shore and gradually transform
into sprawling strings of tears or pearls, feathers, hair, leaves,
and other lamina type forms. The imagery and title refer to William
Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 34” (1609), in which the poet addresses a
former lover who has rejected him; this lover cries tears of shame
and expresses regret, and the poet likens these tears to pearls
that make up for the lover’s “ill deeds.” Thus with this etching of
tears or pearls, Campos-Pons addresses the wounds she has received
during her life. The transatlantic slave trade and the broken
promises of the Cuban Revolution, which forced her to leave her
home country, are important subjects in the work. But America has
caused her disappointment as well. She failed to find the
antiracist and antisexist society promised in the country’s
rhetoric of freedom, leading to psychological and emotional injury.
The collective shame and sorrow felt by contemporary Americans does
nothing to heal the scars of enslaved Africans and their
descendants; however, this work posits that if Westerner’s tears of
shame are as genuine as pearls (which were believed to possess
healing properties in the Elizabethan era, in addition to being
costly and precious), they might elicit forgiveness.4
Justo Germán Cantero
FIG. 6 top: Ingenio Manaca, Propiedad de la Sra. Da. Ja. Hernández
de Isnaga (Manaca Sugar Mill, Property of Ja Hernández de Iznaga),
1857, lithograph
FIG. 7 bottom: Ingo. La Ponina, Propiedad del Sor. Dn. Fernando
Diago (La Ponina Sugar Mill, Property of Fernando Diago), 1857,
lithograph
Courtesy of University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection.
This material is in the public domain in the United States.
07
Neon Queen Collective 2018
Like the lonely traveler: Video Works by María Magdalena
Campos-Pons by Phillip Townsend
The exhibition Like the Lonely Traveler traces the evolution of
María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s video production over the last three
decades, from her early documentary and autobiographical
photographic series to her more recent conceptual explorations. The
works included in this first video retrospective of Campos-Pons
attest to how seemingly fragmented elements of an artist’s lived
experiences coalesce into a multifaceted identity. Indeed, these
works show how Campos-Pons’s continuous investigation of her
complex international identity has yielded new perspectives on
issues such as gender, exile, dislocation, race, religion, and
memory.
Campos-Pons’s first filmic work, Rito de Iniciación/Rite of
Initiation (figs. 8 & 18), marked the beginning of the artist’s
more “sustained reflection on race and ethnicity.”5 This was also
Campos-Pons’s first collaboration with the experimental musician
and composer Neil Leonard, who is now her husband. During the
following thirty years Leonard and Campos-Pons have continued this
creative conversation through their work. As Nancy Pick writes, the
two “have created a synthesis of art and music, Afro-Cuban
and American, ancestral and electronic. They have created something
new and entirely their own, as syncretic as the cultural
intermingling that has taken place in Cuba itself between
Europeans, Asians, and Africans.”6 Seeking a sonic analogue for the
visual poetry and spirituality of Campos-Pons’s work, Leonard has
drawn on sounds such as bells, synthesized percussion, flowing
water, and even samples of Jimi Hendrix. As seen in Rite of
Initiation, this protean soundscape enriches the experiential
impact of the film.
In Rite of Initiation, Campos-Pons addresses the power and
symbolism of female bodily cycles through an interpretation of
Santería and Yoruba rituals. The central figure, played by the
artist, enacts a cleansing ritual using water, milk, and blood,
which symbolize sustenance, sexuality, pleasure, and nourishment.7
According to Campos-Pons:
Rite of Initiation traces the journey from childhood to
womanhood
of a black Cuban woman. In the piece I used nudity as a celebration
of
the body and the purity of the naked self. Also as a mark of
difference
with the credo of the time in which Western feminists were
very
concerned with the representation of women’s bodies. One idea
was
self-representation in a symbolic realm and empowering the
body.8
By representing her body, Campos-Pons claims ownership of her own
form and uses it as a vehicle for the investigation of identity.
Yet rather than mere personal introspection, this bodily
performance suggest an investment in concepts beyond the artist
herself. Similarly, in Cuba Walk (figs. 9 & 16), Campos- Pons
employs fragmented images of her body to evoke the relationship
between identity and the physical experience of a place. The film
shows only Campos-Pons’s legs and feet as she promenades down a
Cuban sidewalk. Voices and the sounds of car engines and horns—a
familiar urban soundscape—are audible. The video highlights both
the simultaneous presence and invisibility of exilic bodies in
post-revolutionary Cuba. The partial display of Campos-Pons’s body
suggests a fragmented return to her home country and harkens back
to Rite of Initiation, in which the movement of the artist’s feet
addresses the challenges and dynamism of self-representation. Near
the end of the video, the camera angle shifts from Campo-Pons’s
feet to her point of view, looking fixedly down at the sidewalk as
she marches forward. In this moment, through the shakiness of the
camera, the viewer is put in Campos-Pons’s position, pushing
through the wind with a determined gait.
FIG. 8 María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Rite of Initiation Sacred Bath
/ Rito de Iniciación, 1991, DVD, 31 min. 23 sec. Sound by Neil
Leonard.
© María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Loan and image courtesy of the
artist.
08
Notes on Sugar / Like the lonely traveler María Magdalena
Campos-Pons
Displacement and the memories it elicits play a vital role
throughout Campos-Pons’s work. Interiority or Hill-Sided Moon (fig.
17), a three-channel video loop featuring superimposed images of
flowers and swirling galaxies, speaks to Campos- Pons’s complex
position as a Cuban expatriate. The video is accompanied by an
audio recording of the artist reciting stanzas from “Deshojación
Sagrada,” a poem by the late Peruvian writer César Vallejo
(1892–1938), while an enchanting guitar melody plays. Vallejo
presents us with an interior landscape of the moon, which is
invoked as a metaphor for a search for the inner self and an
investigation into spirituality. The work emphasizes Campos-Pons’s
interest in ethereality and the power of language over time. Her
life mirrors Vallejo’s in many ways—both are diasporic subjects of
Latin American heritage whose lives have been affected by political
turmoil, dislocation, and exile. Exiled from his home country due
to this political activism, Vallejo spent the last decades of his
life in Europe. Campos-Pons left Cuba as a political exile to
settle in the United States and did not return for over a decade.
The lives and experiences of the two artists and the perpetual
motion of the celestial bodies of our galaxy stand as a metaphor
for the universal experiences of displaced communities. Poetically
conceived, Interiority or Hill-Sided Moon articulates the tensions
and commonalities in seemingly disparate diasporic
identities.
The partial display of Campos-Pons’s body suggests
a fragmented return to her home country.
FIG. 9 María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Cuba Walk, 2012, single channel
video, 4 min. 1 sec. Sound by Neil Leonard.
© María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Loan and image courtesy of the
artist.
1. “The economic difficulties experienced by the British West
Indian colonies during the mid-seventeenth century resulted in a
shift in their agricultural production from tobacco and cotton to
sugarcane. This was made possible with the help of capital,
shipping facilities, and, most important, expertise both in the
methods of growing sugarcane and the techniques of manufacturing
Muscovado sugar cane from the Dutch who were forced to flee from
Brazil after the inhabitants revolted against them around 1654.” M.
K. Bacchus, Utilization, Misuse, and Development of Human Resources
in the Early West Indian Colonies (Canada: Wilfrid Laurier
University Press, 1990), 48.
2. Carl Bridenbaugh and Roberta Bridenbaugh, The Beginnings of the
American People. The English in the Caribbean 1624-1690 (Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1972), 293-296.
3. Pâte de verre is the name bestowed by the French in the
late-nineteenth century to one of the oldest known forms of glass
working. The process involves pressing glass powders or frits into
a mold, which results in a distinctive luster and allows for the
addition of color.
4. George Frederick Kunz and Charles Hugh Stevenson, The Book of
the Pearl: The History, Art, Science, and Industry of the Queen of
Gems (New York: Dover, 1993), 313.
5. Lisa Freiman, María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Everything Is
Separated by Water (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007),
27.
6. Nancy Pick, Peabody Essex Museum (website), “Cuba Distilled:
Bringing Sound to the Alchemy of the Soul,”
http://alchemy.pem.org/cuba_distilled/. Accessed Jan. 6,
2018.
7. Lisa Freiman, María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Everything Is
Separated by Water (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007),
8. Freiman, Campos-Pons, 27.
Neon Queen Collective 2018
JD You have worked across mediums throughout your career,
from
drawing and painting, to photography, installation, and film. How
does your
approach change between formats? More specifically, how does
your
approach to photography and self-portraiture translate into the
kind of
self-portraiture you’re engaging in in your videos?
MMCP There is an overarching conversation going on, and I will add
that it pertains as well to my performance work. I have admired the
work of many women artists, particularly poets and writers, many of
whom create extraordinary self-portraits. Some women artists I
admire are Gabriella Mistral, Alfonsina Storni, Nancy Morejon,
Florence Ladd, Niki Giovani, Maya Angelou, Georgina Betancourt,
Gertrudis Gomes De Avellaneda, Clarice Lispector, and Toni
Morrison.
There is a stanza in a Giovani poem when she talks about those
curtains that you could see through, but you can’t see in. I just
can’t imagine her internally and externally fighting for the right
to see and be seen- for me that is a self-portrait of visibility,
acceptance, solidarity, and community.
KS What sorts of sources do you look to when conceiving ideas
for
your work? Are there any figures that you admire creatively
whose
influences find their way into your work?
I love too many people to mention. I would not be the person/
artist/citizen I am without the very early influence of my mentor
Antonio Vidal. At the age of fifteen when he first saw my work he
told me I could fly as high as my wings and might would take me. So
he is always in my mind.
I was an avid cinema follower as well. I see lots of movies now,
but I devoured Italian, French, Russian, Polish, Czechoslovakian,
Belgian, Brazilian, Cuban, and American cinema. Cinematic culture
in Cuba was extraordinarily rich and my generation was an obsessed
pack of culturally hungry kids. One of my joys in Boston is the
Harvard Film Archive, which I found in 1988, and always to my
surprise and terror it was almost empty- for me that was
unthinkable.
Spending lots of time in Italy made me a devoted follower of
Italian Art and I still use certain things in my work that I took
from there.
An Interview with María Magdalena Campos-Pons by Neon Queen
Collective (Jessi DiTillio, Kaila Schedeen, and Phillip
Townsend)
09
“Visual Healer
María Magdalena Campos-Pons Image courtesy of the Peabody Essex
Museum. photo: Kathy Tarantola.
10
Notes on Sugar / Like the lonely traveler María Magdalena
Campos-Pons
KS Can you talk a bit about the process of making
Sugar/Bittersweet
from both a conceptual and logistical level? How did you
originally
envision the piece?
The final piece is very close to how I envisioned the image of
sugar fields, and juxtaposing certain aspects of the narrative,
such as complicity and complacency, with the triangulation of
cultures. Re-positioning existing cultural objects and
contextualizing them in the visual narrative was very important,
such as conceptual or linguistic paradoxes. For example, in
Spanish, sugar is sometimes called cristal, which also means glass
and reminded me of the similarly granular quality of sugar. The
line quality of the entire installation, which is like a drawing in
space, was opposite to the heaviness and fragility of the
materials. Transparency and translucency are so important in the
work. The piece combines cast glass and cast sugar, and the
physical quality of those materials are very different, but they
appear very similar, so from the physical viewpoint there is a
careful order regarding weight and distribution.
PT In 2016, after a six-year hiatus, you returned to themes of
sugar and
slavery in your exhibition ‘Alchemy of the Soul, Elixir for the
Spirit.’ Why the
return to this complex theme/topic? Were there new concerns you
wanted
to address or were there things you weren’t able to address in
previous
works like Sugar/Bittersweet (2010) and History of People Who Were
Not
Heroes: A Town Portrait (1994)?
My entire body of work is one book with many chapters. I am not
done with sugar; how could I be? Sugar production, trade, and
consumption contains the power structures of the world, and its
repercussions are still present today. Sugar caused the first and
most cruel human trafficking in history; the lesson learned there
is disguised in other forms today, and the imbalance of power that
structures its reign are still alive in the twenty first
century.
KS How do you find a balance in your work between the
overwhelming
histories of trauma that you explore and the joy of creative
production?
I did have a relatively joyful childhood. Even when I was quite
reclusive as a young girl, and encountered traumatic events, I
developed a sort of “optimistic resistance.” I read a lot of
monumental classic works as a young woman that in ways allowed me
to see redemption in the ability of art to access the darkest side
of human experience. I was reading Dostoyevsky, Stendhal, Chekhov,
Tolstoy, Ousmane Sembene, Martí, Tagore, Thomas Mann, Upton
Sinclair, Mark Twain, Lewis, Achebe, Malcom X, Rilke, Vallejo,
Alberti, Hernández, Lorca, and Whitman. A bunch of fantastic
revolutionary and romantic poets. Later, I read philosophy and
Latin American authors Borges, Márquez, Carpentier, Cortázar, and
Benedetti. I went to bed every night with a lover in the form of a
book. I guess if you read Don Quixote you become a dreamer.
I found affirmation in what I read and I grew very proud of my
heritage, my family, the place I was coming from. My father used to
tell me stories of his grandfather, who came as a slave from
Africa, but they were always affirming narratives of how he was a
basket weaver, and the songs he learned from him, he sang for me.
He loved reading anything he could get his hands on, and he read
and shared with me. He went to work in the sugar fields as a
nine-year-old boy, but there was not one sign of resentment. He was
loved by everyone in the community. He knows horrific histories,
but I was grateful for the way he chose to share the truth with me.
He was elegant and composed. He had so much dignity, and
humiliation didn’t bring him down- that is the message my family
instilled in me.
In town when I was young there was still an older man that had been
enslaved, and elsewhere the architecture of slavery remains
present- it’s a history that won’t be forgotten. When I stepped for
the first time into the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana,
Cuba, I told myself I would get my work and the narratives of place
and people I knew on those walls. So I did. Making art is a way to
win over oppression, and also a mirror where society cannot turn
away from certain truths. Art-making provides access to true
freedom, and finding balance and justice. I see the work I have
done as healing pieces of history and having the opportunity for
catharsis of historical wounds.
So I came of age and decided that I could make some rules and make
the art I wanted and not what the market or individuals wanted, or
expected, me to do.
11
1111111111111111
PT You made your fi rst video, Rite of Initiation Sacred Bath (Rito
de
Iniciacion Bano Sagrado) in 1991, and your most recent video work
was
featured in 2017 at documenta14 as a part of your moving and
critically
acclaimed interactive installation, Bar Matanzas. What has
changed
from your fi rst experience with video to now?
My very fi rst piece in 1988 was fi lm, and I am always longing to
return to fi lm. I think my next moving image piece will be fi lm
again, though I’m not sure as I have lots of video work waiting to
be edited. I think the work is more meditative in the later pieces.
I was recently in Cuba after a great storm, and all I wanted to do
was fi lm the extraordinary story that was taking form in my
sister’s yard. There is so much drama in minutiae.
JD How has your work changed with your location, i.e. moving
from
Cuba to the U.S., to different parts of the U.S., and then becoming
a highly
international artist working across the globe? Does the specifi
city of certain
places come into play in different bodies of work? Has the
experience
of international migration taken on new resonance for you in our
current
political moment?
I come from an island. Continental experiences and borders are so
meaningful, and to be surrounded by water is quite a unique and
magnifi cently humbling thing. There is no place to go except to
the sea.
When I moved to Italy I produced an entire body of work, SONO QUI,
that traces the insertion of black experiences in Europe,
especially in the Veneto region of Italy. That body of work has not
been seen in the US but it charts an important moment in a sense of
the transient nature of the body and other narratives I have
focused on.
My invitation to the Guangzhou Triennale in China produced another
view of heritage, history and the sugar trade. Coming to the US
gave me a perspective of Cuba I could not see when there. I am just
in the middle of processing both my work and myself— we are in
progress.
JD Your performance work often draws on the form of rituals or
rites,
and evokes the fi gures and deities of Santería. Could you talk
about the
relationship between spirituality, ritual and performance in your
work?
Is there a difference between performing a spiritual rite for its
own sake,
and performing it for an art world audience?
Those works are informed by childhood memories and dreams. Most of
my work evolves from dreams. I want to be a “visual healer,“ I want
to allow people to encounter an experience that allows them to ask
a question or open a conversation. There is privilege in having
people’s attention for any given space of time, and I want to give
back a gift to every viewer. I try my best to carry some truth in
my accounts. Every time I start a new piece, I am in pain and
almost afraid—I gather all of my courage to show my dreams and
observations to others.
I want to help people to see more. I ask for forgiveness for
believing that my work can do just that.
11
I want to be a “Visual Healer,” I want to allow people to encounter
an experience that allows them to ask a question or open a
conversation.
12
Notes on Sugar / Like the lonely traveler María Magdalena
Campos-Pons
Notes on Sugar: The Work of María Magdalena Campos-Pons
FIG. 10 right: Are Those Tears or Pearls, My Beloved One?,
2008, etching and aquatint, 30 15/16 in. x 22 7/16 in.
© María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Loan and image courtesy of The
Blanton Museum of Art,
The University of Texas at Austin, Anonymous Gift, 2009. photo:
Rick Hall.
FIG. 11 left/below: Sugar/Bittersweet, 2010,
mixed media installation, dimensions variable
© María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Image courtesy of Smith College
Museum of Art. photo: Stephen Petegorsky. Loan courtesy of
the
Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at
the Hutchins Center, Harvard University.
Works in Exhibitions
Notes on Sugar: The Work of María Magdalena Campos-Pons
FIG. 13 above: Songs of Freedom, 2013, Polaroid, 29 x 21.5 inches,
each
© María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Loan and image courtesy of Samsøn
Projects.
Like the lonely traveler: Video Works by María Magdalena
Campos-Pons FIG. 12 left: La Viajera, 2006, single channel video, 9
min. 40 sec.
© María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Loan and image courtesy of the
artist.
15
Notes on Sugar / Like the lonely traveler María Magdalena
Campos-Pons
Neon Queen Collective 2018
Notes on Sugar: The Work of María Magdalena Campos-Pons
FIG. 14 left: Inspired by Ghosts: Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons in
Cuba, 2016, video, 8 min.
Produced for the exhibition Alchemy of the Soul at the Peabody
Essex Museum. Edited for this exhibition by Neon Queen Collective
with Michael E. Stephen. © María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Loan and
image courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum.
Like the lonely traveler: Video Works by María Magdalena
Campos-Pons
FIG. 15 above: Cuba Walk, 2012, single channel video, 4 min. 1 sec.
Sound by Neil Leonard.
© María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Loan and image courtesy of the
artist.
18
Notes on Sugar / Like the lonely traveler María Magdalena
Campos-Pons
19
Like the lonely traveler: Video Works by María Magdalena
Campos-Pons
FIG. 17 left, top: Interiority or Hill Sided Moon, 2005, single
channel video, 11 min. 15 sec. Sound by Neil Leonard. © María
Magdalena Campos-Pons. Loan and image courtesy of the artist.
FIG. 18 left, bottom: Rite of Initiation Sacred Bath / Rito de
Iniciación, 1991, DVD, 31 min. 23 sec. Sound by Neil Leonard.
© María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Loan and image courtesy of the
artist.
Like the lonely traveler: Video Works by María Magdalena
Campos-Pons
FIG. 16 below: My Mother Told Me I am Chinese, 2008, single channel
video, 5 min. 48 sec. Sound by Neil Leonard. © María Magdalena
Campos-Pons. Loan and image courtesy of the artist.
20
Notes on Sugar / Like the lonely traveler María Magdalena
Campos-Pons
This catalogue is published by Wendi Norris Gallery in conjunction
with the exhibitions Notes on Sugar: The Work of María Magdalena
Campos-Pons, held at the Christian-Green Gallery of the John
L.
Warfi eld Center for African and African American Studies at the
University of Texas at Austin, January 25–May 5, 2018; and Like the
lonely traveler: Video Works by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, held
at the Visual Arts Center of the Department of Art and Art History
at
the University of Texas at Austin, September 21–December 8,
2018.
The exhibitions and catalogue were a labor of friendship, political
conviction, and love, and without the support of many
involved
parties it could not have come to fruition. We would like to
express particular thanks to the following staff at the Warfi
eld
Center: Dr. Cherise Smith (Executive Director), Lise Ragbir
(Director of The Art Galleries at Black Studies), and Sonja Reid
(Exhibition
Coordinator); as well as to those at the Visual Arts Center: Jack
Risley (Department Chair), Amy Hauft (Acting Director),
Clare Donnelly (Gallery Manager), and Marc Silva (Gallery
Preparator). Many thanks go to the generous institutions that lent
us
Campos-Pons’s works from their collections: The Ethelbert Cooper
Gallery of African & African American Art at the Hutchins
Center at Harvard University, The Blanton Museum of Art at the
University of Texas at Austin, The Peabody-Essex Museum,
Samsøn Projects, and Wendi Norris Gallery. We would also like to
thank Becky Nasadowski for her engaged and thoughtful graphic
design of the publication, Patricia Ortega-Miranda for her generous
translations of our wall texts into Spanish, and
Jesse Cline for the design of the Neon Queen Collective logo.
Finally, we would like to thank María Magdalena Campos-Pons
for inspiring this project, and for her generosity and patience
working with a brand new curatorial collective.
The exhibitions and related programming were generously supported
by the following parties at the University of Texas at
Austin:
CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN VISUAL STUDIES
DEPARTMENT OF ART AND ART HISTORY, DEPARTMENT OF THE CHAIR
CENTER FOR MEXICAN AMERICAN STUDIES
CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF MODERNISM
DEPARTMENT OF MEXICAN AMERICAN AND LATINA/O STUDIES
BERNARD AND AUDRE RAPOPORT CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS AND
JUSTICE
AND THE HUMAN RIGHTS & THE ARTS WORKING GROUP
DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE
ACADEMIC ENRICHMENT FUND - THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
LATINO RESEARCH INITIATIVE
DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY
BLACK DIASPORA ARCHIVE
SEAN WALSH
CHELSEA WEATHERS
CHERISE WILLIAMS
CHRISTIAN WURST
Additional support was provided by a number of individuals through
the HornRaiser crowdfunding platform, including many anonymous
donors,
and for their support we are joyfully grateful. These supporters
included our friends, family, colleagues, and a few bold-hearted
strangers:
THE NEON QUEEN COLLECTIVE IS A TRIO OF AUSTIN-BASED CURATORS—JESSI
DITILLIO, KAILA SCHEDEEN,
AND PHILLIP TOWNSEND—WHO COLLABORATE TO INVESTIGATE TOPICS RELATED
TO RACE, ETHNICITY,
REPRESENTATION, CLASS, SEXUALITY, AND GENDER IN SOCIALLY ENGAGED
ART PRODUCED BY
FEMINIST ARTISTS OF COLOR.